DEV Community: Ondřej Koraba

Getting Your Website Indexed by Google

Ondřej Koraba — Mon, 05 Oct 2020 05:32:34 +0000

If your content isn’t indexed by Google, does it even exist?

Indexing means that Google has evaluated your content and put it to its extensive list — index — of websites that can be seen in its search results page (SERP) when users type in a relevant query.

Overall, Google’s indexing process is a complicated one, with many phases affecting each other.

The speed of indexing your website depends on various factors, from the size of your website, its authority, or even the quality of your hosting. The quality of your content plays a crucial role as well. And at the end of the day, Google always has the final word whether to index your website or not.

On the other hand, there are a few strategies on how to speed up the process.

But firstly, to make it possible for Google to index your website faster, you need to get rid of any roadblocks that may prevent it from happening. Secondly, you should let Google know that there is a website to be indexed. And finally, the content of your website should be worth indexing.

12 steps to speed up Google’s indexing process

How to get Google to index your website quickly

Prevent robots directives from impacting indexing
Set up canonical tags correctly
Don’t disallow content you want to get indexed
Prevent crawler traps and optimize crawl budget
Feed Google indexable content through an XML sitemap
Manually submit your URLs to Google Search Console
Automatic indexing via the Google Indexing API
Provide Google with high-quality content only
Prevent duplicate content
Leverage internal links and avoid using nofollow
Build relevant backlinks to your content
Create buzz around your content on social media

Learn more about how to get Google to index your website.

How to Boost Your Shopify store’s SEO Performance

Ondřej Koraba — Mon, 28 Sep 2020 13:22:33 +0000

Although it’s one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms in the world, Shopify doesn’t have a great reputation among SEO.

So we’ve dug into the matter and found that — similar to any platform out there — you can turn it into organic traffic generating machine.

In nutshell, doing SEO for Shopify is very similar to other platforms, because it’s all about the three major pillars: technology, relevance, and authority and trust.

With these three crucial elements in mind, we can focus on improving each part of it.

From a technological perspective, we should always look at these few steps.

Best practices for Shopify SEO

URL structure

A clear URL structure is essential for both visitors and search engines in navigating your site. In general, URLs should always be brief, easy to read, consistent, and lowercase.

However, by default, Shopify doesn’t offer many options on how to set the structure according to your preferences. Only the slug – the last part of a URL – can be modified.

Shopify uses the name collections for what’s usually called product category pages. By default, collections have the following URL structure: https://example.com/collections/$collectionName. You can define the collection name yourself.

For example, if you have a collection called “socks”, that collection’s URL becomes https://example.com/collections/socks/

Your products are listed under the URL https://example.com/products/$productName. However, Shopify also generates another URL for the same product including the collection:
https://example.com/collections/$collectionName/products/$productName

Although the shorter link is canonicalized, creating both links and canonicals creates a lot of overhead which might result in sending search engines unclear signals.

However, you can fix this by updating your theme’s code to directly reference the canonical URL of your products. You’ll thereby stop Shopify from linking to the product URL that’s canonicalized.

Managing URL redirects

When you’re changing URLs in your store, Shopify will offer you the option to automatically create a 301 redirect. We recommend this approach if your store is already live. You can use the redirect manager for every redirect that’s added this way.

However, a major drawback is that the feature doesn’t allow you to set up redirects using Regular Expressions (RegEx), meaning that you have to either fill in all redirects manually or get creative and generate them yourself and then import them through the redirect manager.

Meta information

Meta information, especially meta titles and descriptions are vital elements for your SEO success. By default, Shopify allows you to generate meta information automatically for collections, tags, products, and for pages and blog articles.

There is also an option to create a meta-information template for your store, which is a huge time saver. However, it’s not supported out of the box, so it requires installing a dedicated app from the Shopify app store.

Headings

Follow these six rules to get the maximum out of your headings in Shopify:

Use only one H1 heading per page.
A frequent mistake is to wrap logos or images in H1 heading tags. The H1 heading conveys a page’s main topic, so you should avoid making it appear unclear.
Stick to the maximum heading length of 60 characters as it improves readability
Don’t use headings for elements that are present on every page, such as search functionality.
Don’t apply H2 headings to product names on collection pages.
Build up your heading structure using a logical hierarchy, as illustrated below:

Site architecture, internal links, menus, and facets

Not being able to achieve great URL structure is a bit of a downside of Shopify, as the platform doesn’t support defining hierarchies within collections in Shopify.

However, while you can’t achieve the ideal URL structure for collections and sub-collections, you can at least present parent-child collections using nested menus.

Find a detailed explanation of how to use the nested menus in Shopify’s documentation, and in this thread on its community forum.

Another challenge lies in faceted navigation. Facets help users filter the products according to various factors, such as size or color. But having multiple variants of pretty much identical product and category pages can lead to issues with duplicate content.

Ideally, to avoid these issues, you’d make selected facets accessible to search engines and keep the rest inaccessible. However, Shopify does not enable this approach. We thus recommend creating collections to group the products people search for. By default, these are accessible for search engines.

Crawling & indexing directives

On Shopify, there are two ways to make sure search engines won’t be indexing some parts of your content:

The less scalable and more error-prone way: by making code changes, as explained in Shopify’s documentation.
By using an app that adds a setting for this within Shopify’s admin console

Image optimization

To make sure your images load fast and search engines can easily “understand” what they are about, follow these practices:

Serve images through a CDN – Luckily, Shopify does this out-of-the box.
Include images in your XML sitemap
Compress images – this is something Shopify doesn’t do out-of-the box.
Use a descriptive filename and the right image file type for the job and resize images to the dimensions required – you can do all this yourself before uploading.
- Shopify admin console lets you define the image alt attribute and have relevant text close to the image

Page speed

The infrastructure of Shopify is massive and includes a powerful CDN, which gives it great potential. In addition, it uses caching heavily. That’s all great: you’ve got the basics covered!

To get the highest speed out of your Shopify store, you should consider what theme you are choosing, and what apps you’ll be installing as they are usually the most common reasons why Shopify stores load slowly. Try using apps as little as you can.

Pay special attention to image optimization that plays a huge role in the overall performance.

Last but not least, move all tracking scripts to Google Tag Manager to reduce the number of requests that pages make.

Continue improving your Shopify store’s SEO

All in all, achieving successful SEO performance with your Shopify store is more than possible, despite the rumors circulating around.

Would you like to know more about how to make your Shopify store rank well? Check out our super extensive Shopify SEO guide.

Did your rankings drop? Follow 13 easy steps to recover

Ondřej Koraba — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 13:46:36 +0000

Everyone who strives for the highest positions in search engines sometimes experiences the inevitable—the hard-earned rankings suddenly drop.

There are many different reasons why this happens, both internal and external. The cause often reflects changes done to the website or an update to the website’s content that doesn’t turn out well.

There can also be other factors, such as a search engine’s algorithm update, SERP layout changes, technical issues, or even a Google penalty. Besides, the market is constantly evolving with users changing their preferences and competitors making striking moves.

But, at the end of the day, ranking is only one of the many parts of SEO.

When the pandemic hits

We can see a great example of ranking being almost insignificant in the current outbreak of the new coronavirus that has reshaped the users' behavior to an extent no one had foreseen.

One of the many victims of Covid-19 has been the whole travel industry. Once the pandemic hit the world, people rather barricaded themselves at home and worried more about their well being than their past-time activities on a tropical island.

Although the ranking of travel-related keywords didn’t change much during the time, people stopped searching for them and the organic traffic went down in a landslide. Simultaneously, health and safety-related search queries increase in volumes.

This means that a drop in rankings doesn’t mean the end of the world and there are more elements we should monitor as well.

However, an experienced SEO should always remain prepared for any eventuality. Having a process in place for investigating the possible reason for the drop is highly recommended, so is monitoring and tracking changes to your website’s content and technical foundation. After all, without that information, you’re in the dark.

Once you realize that your rankings have dropped, you should follow these 13 steps.

Don’t panic
Double Check if your Google Rankings really dropped
Scope the impact of the drop
Analyze recent changes to the website
Look for possible technical issues
Check if there wasn't a Google algorithm update recently
Or if there wasn’t an update to SERP
Reconsider disavowing backlinks
Look for possible Google Manual Action
Analyze if your website hasn’t been hacked
Look at possible changes in search intent and behavior
Look for any moves made by your competitors
Look for lost backlinks

Need more answers on ranking drops? Read our extensive guide.